Monday Box Office Report – Marooned is good

You may have noticed some are calling Matt Damon the un-Sean Bean. Instead of getting killed, his career appears to be about being rescued all the time. First Saving Private Ryan, then Interstellar and now The Martian. The film industry is spending a lot of cash rescuing Damon, but audiences clearly love seeing that.

Darryn is off playing with videos or something – we stopped asking around the same time we stopped shaking his hand (now for hygiene reasons we just wave) – but like walking into a stranger’s office I’m not sure where everything is. Still, I will attempt to bring the latest and greatest glories of the past U.S. box office weekend to your screens.

As my intro suggests, The Martian is a cracking success – $55 million, nearly halfway to its budget. Internationally it has already passed the $100 million mark. Ridley Scott must be so happy – his career lately being a series of wrecks and even leading people like me doubt if he still had that spark in him. But The Martian is his second-strongest opener ever (after Hannibal) and already in his ten best-grossing films. Gladiator is at the top with nearly $200 million, but The Martian may just become Scott’s biggest hit yet.

Another controversial type is Adam Sandler, who the world loves to hate. Pixels did not help his cause much, but the arrival of Hotel Transylvania 2 is certainly not hurting his bank account. After two weeks it has earned near $100 million domestically, so that is a qualified hit. I bet whoever kicked Genndy Tartakovsky off the Popeye project is starting to regret it…

The rest are all down there, but I want to point to one stand-out – the crime thriller Sicario. It opened in September at position 25, then shifted to 10th. Now it sits at the third spot and grossed more this past weekend than in its entire run. But there is a reason for this glorious leap: after two weeks the movie was expanded from less than sixty theatres to over 2,500. That would do it, helped along by some great reviews (though the first review I saw was less flattering, comparing it to True Detective‘s second season. Oh well, can’t please everyone).

The Martian – $55 million

Hotel Transylvania 2 – $33 million

Sicario – $12.7 million

The Intern – $11.6 million

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials – $7.6 million

Black Mass – $5.9 million

Everest – $5.5 million

The Visit – $3.9 million

War Room – $2.8 million

The Perfect Guy – $2.4 million

Departing the top 10 is Green Inferno, Eli Roth’s attempt at rebirthing the cannibal sub-genre. I really can’t stomach this kind of stuff – I’ve never even seen Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox, the genre’s most notorious examples. Many other people appear to agree – despite a $5 million budget, Green Inferno barely scraped its cash back. That said, the real place for such a movie is in DVD and VOD, where cult fans and gorehounds can enjoy it in private. So I expect Roth has a slow-burning hit on his hands, if only because the cannibal genre has not seen much action since the Eighties.

A total movie glutton, nothing is too bad or too obscure to watch, unless it's something like The Human Centipede. If you enjoyed that, there is something wrong with you. But bless you anyway - even video nasties need love...

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